CRIME: The man who named LAPD officer as Notorious B.I.G.’s killer says it was a scam.

By The Associated Press

A prison inmate who implicated a former Los Angeles Police Department officer in the killing of rap star Notorious B.I.G. has recanted his story, a move that provides another twist in a complex and unsolved killing.

Waymond Anderson, a former R&B artist now serving a life sentence for murder in a separate case, said in a deposition that he lied about the officer’s involvement as part of a scam to win a monetary settlement from the city.

Anderson’s deposition, first reported in Wednesday’s Los Angeles Times, states he was offered a portion of any settlement if he testified that former Los Angeles police officer Rafael Perez told him David Mack, his former patrol partner, was involved in the killing of B.I.G.

Mack and Perez have long denied any involvement.

“I don’t know David Mack, I don’t know Rafael Perez,” Anderson said in the deposition, made Aug. 20.

B.I.G., whose given name was Christopher Wallace, was 24 when he was gunned down March 9, 1997, while leaving a music industry party at Los Angeles’ Petersen Automotive Museum. The New York rapper was one of the country’s most influential hip-hop artists, and theories have proliferated for years about who might have been behind his killing and why.

His family has filed a wrongful death suit seeking damages from the city. It accuses the Los Angeles Police Department, and specifically Mack, of responsibility for Wallace’s death.

In his deposition, Anderson accused the family and its lawyer of offering to cut him in for a portion of any award for falsely implicating the police.

Mack and Perez have since left the Police Department. Mack is serving a federal prison sentence for bank robbery. Perez was the officer who blew the whistle on the Los Angeles Police Department’s Rampart scandal in which anti-gang officers who patrolled the city’s Rampart neighborhood often beat and framed innocent people. Perez exposed the scandal after being caught stealing cocaine from a police evidence room. He has changed his name.